By Ashutosh Kumar, The author is a Professor, Department of Political Science, Punjab University, Chandigarh

India is among the few nations that have an unbroken history of conducting fair and regular elections. While the credit of a sustained electoral politics goes to the citizens of the country, the definition of a citizen has itself remained debatable and is likely to determine the course of 2019 General Elections.

Electronic voting machines have transformed the system of voting world over. The machines have undergone multiple changes since its inception and even today continue to evolve. In India, EVMs have ensured free and fair elections which are essential to maintain the democratic culture of the country.

While debates around the relative advantage and disadvantage of electoral systems have usually centred on First-Past-The-Post and Proportional Representation Systems, both these need to be revisited in the context of India.

The last Lok Sabha election of 2014 was the most expensive election in the history of Indian democracy with a cost of Rs 3,426 crores incurred by the national exchequer. This represented an increase by 131 per cent over the expenses incurred in the 2009 Lok Sabha election; in the 2009 election, a cost of Rs 1,483 crores was incurred by the national exchequer (The Hindu, 2016).
According to the Ministry of Law and Social Justice and the Election Commission of India, election expenditures in India...

A profound fact of environmental protection and conservation is that the impacts of human-induced processes on the environment must be measured and the performance of the processes be assessed, policies be created on this basis and integrated into developmental processes and that the practice and implementation of these policies must be adequate. Most international agreements for the environment aim towards these objectives such that a process and discipline are present in the management and regulation...

There are three schools of thought that dominate analyses of voting behaviour – the sociological school, the psychosocial school and thought based on rational choice theory, which de facto represents the economic school. The sociological model of voting behaviour focuses on the influence of social factors, while the psychosocial model studies the behaviour of voters based on their party affiliations, and the rational choice model utilizes variables affecting choice such as rationality, information and...

In a path breaking decision, the Supreme Court ruled on August 24, 2017 that privacy is a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution of India. The verdict was delivered by a nine-Judge bench of the Supreme Court of India led by Chief Justice J.S. Khehar.
The Court, providing new dimensions to the privacy debate, in its 547-page judgment overruled the M.P. Sharma verdict of 1958 and the Kharak Singh verdict of 1961 in which the verdict was dependent on the right to privacy not being...

The Paris Climate Agreement became operational from November 4, 2016. To mark the historic occasion, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris were lit up in celebration. And the celebration was indeed justified, given the fact that it has entered into into force in about one eighth of the time it took the Kyoto protocol to achieve the same milestone, as pointed out by The Guardian on the day (The Guardian, 2016).
The threshold for the Agreement to come into operation was achieved on October...

After Narendra Modi took over as the Prime Minister of India, expectations on several fronts, including parliamentary reforms rose. The status quoist attitude of the previous governments influenced people's thinking and turned Indian bureaucracy lethargic. The change of power happened in 2014 on the promise of change. It took around two years to bring the goods and services tax preliminary legislation on track, which will be a landmark reform in our indirect taxation system. The Planning Commission...

The South China Sea (SCS) is has become a hotbed of regional maritime disputes and tensions with global ramifications. SCS is one of the main lines of global economy and trade, with more than 5 trillion USD of trading through ships taking place through SCS every year. However, the regional giant China, has increasingly demonstrated its ‘strategic’ intentions in the SCS with its ownership claims, military build-up in Woody Island and articulation of ‘nine-dash’ lines that brings large part...